Primo Levi

A Jewish, originally Italian chemist, Primo Levi (31st July 1919–11 April 1987) was a writer and poet. The man who experienced the life’s most threaten days and months. Moreover, Primo Levi survival in Auschwitz is one of the few holocaust survivors.

Levi spent a total 11 months in Nazi camps and those also called as concentration camps. However, he was forced to work as a chemist to one of the chemical factories of Germany, IG Farben. His life indoor was not less than a slave labour who was an equal to prisoner.

Levi many times bullied being an Italian Jewish. In his school days, he was shortest, youngest, and cleverest. He lived at Corso Re Umberto, Turin, the house gifted by maternal grandpa to his mother. He studied chemistry at Turin and became a working professional at the age of 24.

The aims of life are the best defence against death.

Primo Levi

After the return to Italy of his successive 11 months of survivals, he started working for a paint company where he spent almost the next 30 years of his life. During those years he started sharpening his writing tools, go back in times of his nightmares and recalls his threatening memories. While, he triggered his writing skills, wrote many poems, essays, short stories and produced two novels.

The novel which earned popular fame for Levi was “If This is A Man” in 1947 and another hit in the year 1975 was “The Periodic Table”. His first novel, “If This is A Man” talks about his horror life at Auschwitz that how he survived and returned alive to Italy. However, “The Periodic Table” consist of his idiosyncratic autobiography where each chapters named as a chemical element.

Levi had earned the fame after the proximate released of “If This is A Man” due to his exceptional narrating realistic placement in the novels. Those Nazi camps of life’s thriller and horrible experiences moulded his thoughtful mind for the longer period of time. The most of the chemist deals with reactions in their real life. However, if the life visits out of the science dilemma, the reality considered the most reactive than the science. Therefore, for any chemist who turned to writer, definitely look into the life the same way chemical reaction does. And thus grabbed the result of the strong precipitation. Levi described the same, what had happened to him at the concentration camps.

The experience at Auschwitz was his unforgettable resisting journey in his life. It taught him the real values of society. Therefore, triggered his imagination wildly. Once he said, “If I hadn’t had the experience of Auschwitz, I probably would not have written anything.” Furthermore, his suicide shocked many others and not able to believe what exactly had happened to him. Levi once had told to his close friends that he is going through depressions. His death was due to fall from 3rd floor flat.

Primo Levi’s death was a such a shock to me that even now I feel that some mistakes was made in reporting what actually happened.

Alfred Kazin (the American writer and critic)

Later his progressive years he was weakening intellectual and being nervous most of the time. Arthur H. Samuelson, the senior editor at Harper & Row said, “was struck by how fragile he appeared, how intense, nervous.” However, he also stated that “I still struggle with the riddle of his suicide, it came as a complete surprise.” He was tired physically as well as mentally as per Lorenzo Mondo (the Italian literary critic and cultural editor of the Turin newspaper)

Levi wrote his last book, “The Drowned and The Saved” in 1986 a year before the suicide.

Poem: “If This is A man” by Primo Levi

You who live safe
In your warm houses
you who find returning in the evening
hot food and friendly faces
consider if this is a man
who works in the mud
who does not know peace,
who fights for a scrap of bread,
who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman
without air and without name,
with no more strength to remember,
her eyes empty and her womb cold
life a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about
I recommended these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
at home, in the street, going to bed rising
repeat them to your children,
or may your house fall apart
may illness impede you,
may your children turn their faces from you.

Also, read about Fazlur Rahman: “The Successful Can Be Saved From Their Selfishness” and Munshi Premchand who says that Beauty Does Not Need Ornaments